"A few days ago Mr.
Boutros Ghali informed me that the projectile which hit
the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo was an act of
(Bosnian) Muslim provocation". President
Mitterrand of France, 1995

Open military confrontation in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended
with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement on 14th
December 1995. The conflict had resulted in more than
160,000 deaths, and 2.5 million refugees and displaced
persons. Not long before, the United Nations (UN) had
ordered the first combat units from its rapid reaction force
into Sarajevo, after after Serb rebels killed two French
peacekeepers. Three Bosnian Serb shells had hit the French
and Danish areas of a U.N. compound in Zetra, north of
Sarajevo's centre killing a French peacekeeper and wounding
another French soldier and a Dane. A half-hour later,
another French peacekeeper was killed and two wounded, one
seriously, when a U.N. convoy was targeted by Serbs in the
suburb of Butmir. The deaths brought the number of French
dead to 42 since the Bosnian war began in April 1992 - and
not all of them were killed by the Bosnian Serbs, a number
of them were also killed in crossfire or deliberately by the
forces of the Bosnian government.

Not only did the UN get tough
with the Bosnian Serbs - whose political and military
leaders have now been charged with war crimes - in 1995,
NATO had become directly involved when when they ordered air
strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. These attacks had been
preceded by a series of barbaric attacks against civilians
in the Markele market in Sarajevo, all of which were assumed
to be the work of the Serb army laying siege to Sarajevo.

There were three attacks on the
markets, all of which were blamed on them: the first on 27th
May 1992, killed 16 people, the second on 5th February 1994
killed 68, and the third on 28th August 1995, killed 37. The
last attack is the most significant, as it has been widely
alleged, by members of the UN Mission in Bosnia, UN
Commanding officers and of course, predictably, the Bosnian
Serbs themselves, that this one in particular was staged by
elements within the Bosnian government to provide the
pretext for NATO military involvement in the war. In
subsequent attacks, bombs and bullets used by the NATO jets
used Depleted Uranium (DU) which is now estimated to have
claimed the lives of some Serb 300 civilians who lived in
the vicinity of the bases hit by NATO, according to reports
that surfaced in 2001. What evidence is there for the claims
that the Bosnian government carried out these attacks ?

The first attack in
1992

The first of three attacks
happened on 27th May 1992 when 16 people killed in a "mortar
attack" on a bread queue in Vase Miskina street in Sarajevo.
As The Independent (22nd August 1992) noted, the
televised scenes of civilians cut to pieces by an explosion
as they queued for bread horrified international public
opinion, and added growing pressure for NATO to "intervene"
in the civil war against the Bosnian Serbs. Vivid footage
showed dead bodies littering the street and "terrified
crying people sitting on the pavement in pools of blood".
The attacks came shortly before a meeting by European Union
ambassadors to consider imposing sanctions on the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia. UN officials from the start were
"suspicious about the circumstances but would not go public
with their thoughts without jeopardising the UN mission" in
Bosnia. Classified reports given to the commander of the UN
peace keepers, General Satish Nambiar, concluded that it was
likely that the army of the Bosnian government in Sarajevo
carried out the attack. In fact, they were reported to
believe it wasn't a mortar attack at all but a
"command-detonated explosion - probably in a can". The
impact mark left by the "mortar" on the market square floor
was nowhere "near as large as we came to expect with a
mortar round lading on a paved surface". This is also
supported by another UN commander in Bosnia, General Michael
Rose of the British army, who according to his book
Dispatch the Bosnian government in Sarajevo shelled
their own people to get a military response by NATO against
the Bosnian Serbs (The Observer, 28th March 1999).
NATO launched air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs as a
result of this attack.

According to The
Independent, United Nations (UN) officials and senior
Western military officers believe that the attack in 1992
was carried out by the Bosnian government, "To win world
sympathy and trigger intervention". This was also
expressed in confidential reports circulating at the UN
headquarters in New York, and in classified briefings to US
policy makers in Washington, according to the British
newspaper. The attack on the bread queue in Vase Miskina
Street also led to draconian sanctions against Yugoslavia
imposed by the Security Council (resolution 757) on 30th May
1992 (which had been preceded by Yugoslavia's expulsion from
the WHO). All supplies of raw materials to the
well-developed pharmaceutical industry of Yugoslavia for
production of medicines were immediately suspended. The
justification for blaming Yugoslavia for attacks carried out
in Bosnia was based on Western intelligence disinformation
that the country was directing the war on behalf of the
Bosnian Serbs.

The second attack in
1994

The second attack on a market
in Sarajevo happened on 5th February 1994 when a single
mortar round left 68 dead and 200 wounded. Some people
immediately questioned how son many civilians had been
killed or wounded by one mortar bomb. Furthermore, officials
from the Bosnian government did allow anyone from UNPROFOR
to verify what had happened. Despite vehement denials from
the Bosnian Serbs, the US news channel, CNN, immediately
reported that they were responsible for the shocking carnage
that the attack left, which CNN claimed was "caused by a
Serb mortar bomb". The US President Bill Clinton added to
this saying it was "highly likely" that the Bosnian Serbs
were responsible for it.

Thus, US ambassador to the UN,
Madeline Albright and the US presidential security advisor
Anthony Lake, immediately called for NATO air strikes
against the Bosnian Serbs. Yet there were already people
claiming that even the UN itself did not suspect the Bosnian
Serbs, but this appears to have been suppressed by the
Western media, possibly acting under covert British and
American pressure, assuming the the whole purpose of the
mortar attack was to provide the pretext for NATO military
involvement in the Balkans for the first time. If this is
not the case, then it is certainly hinted at by the former
British Foreign Secretary David Owen in his book Balkan
Odyssey (Victor Gollanz, London, 1995):

"People around
General Rose never tried to hide the fact that at his
meeting with Bosnian Muslim leaders (President Alia
Izetbegovic and General Delic) he said that he had just
received some information which shows that the mortar
bomb did not come from the area under Serb control but
from the Muslim part of the city . . ."

However, Owen's account of the
the Market square massacre in 1994 has been criticised by
Noel Malcom in a review of his book in The Sunday
Telegraph on 12th November 1995.

When discussing the
market-place massacre in Sarajevo of February 1994, Lord
Owen goes on at length about a UN investigation which
concluded that the mortar shell had been fired from a
Bosnian Government position. Dramatically, he confirms
that General Rose put pressure on Bosnian ministers by
threatening to reveal this finding, unless they did as
they were told. What Lord Owen does not tell us is that a
second, more thorough investigation found that the first
had made mistakes in its calculations, and concluded that
the shell could equally have come from the Serb side. It
is surely inconceivable that Owen is unaware of this
second report; yet he chooses not to mention it. Readers
will have to draw their own conclusions about the overall
reliability of this grotesquely vainglorious
book.

But, Owen also fails to give
any clear evidence as to the perpetrators of this attack -
if you read his statement carefully, he is only telling us
that the second investigation, although on one hand,
described as "more thorough", still concluded that the shell
could "equally" have come from the Serb side. This indicates
to me that their is still no hard evidence that either side
were responsible. Bosnian Serb and Russian claims should be
treated with scepticism (as they have a vested interest,
from a propaganda point-of-view, in making sure these
allegations are widely circulated). But the claims of the UN
and representatives of various NATO countries serving as
peacekeepers should be treated as serious and worthy of
investigation.

From example, On 6th June 1996,
Yasushi Akashi, UN special envoy for Bosnia, told a German
journalist working for DPA in New York, that there was a
secret UN report accusing the Bosnian government forces of
this massacre. It was claimed that this secret report was
passed on to the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros
Ghali, who did not publish it in the interest of "higher
politics". Citing this UN report, B. Volker, a French
journalist working for TV TF1 said that the mortar bomb was
fired from Bosnian government positions. Volker also quotes
the words of President Mitterrand: "A few days ago Mr.
Boutros Ghali informed me that the projectile which hit the
Markale marketplace in Sarajevo was an act of (Bosnian)
Muslim provocation".

The third attack in
1995

The third attack, on 28th
August 1995 also hit market and left 37 dead and 90 wounded.
When UN issued a declaration blaming the Bosnian Serbs, it
evidently ignored the report of the British and French
experts as well as the assessment of the UN's artillery
expert for the Sarajevo sector, a Russian colonel, A.
Demurenko. Soon after the attack, NATO launched extensive
air strikes against Bosnian Serb military and civilian
targets. The strategy appeared pre-planned as it coincided
with an joint Croat and Bosnian government offensive against
the Bosnian Serbs. The attacks changed the course of the war
in Bosnia as enabled NATO to enter the conflict on behalf of
the Bosnian government and Croat forces. After this attack,
President Yeltsin gave official credence to reports
circulating in the Russian media that a "third party" was
responsible for the mortar attack on the bread queue.
Yeltsin said that Russia "insists" that the UN "look again"
at the attacks as there was new evidence indicating that it
was not the Bosnian Serb's who carried out the attack.
Despite this, NATO went ahead and launched air strikes. One
military adviser to the foreign ministry, General Boris
Gromov, even claimed (with no evidence provided) that one of
the NATO powers was involved in the mortar attack "as a
provocation". Yeltsin also said:

"Why am l against
the expansion of NATO ? This (mortar attack in Sarajevo)
is the first sign of what might happen when NATO comes
right up to the borders of the Russian Federation. Those
who insist on the expansion of NATO are making a major
political mistake. The flame of war would burst out
across the whole of Europe" (The Guardian, 9th September
1995).

The Russians and Bosnian Serbs
have claimed that the third attack was prepared in advance
over many months by "certain" Western secret services
(probably including the CIA), and that Bosnian government
troops under the commander of the General R. Delic carried
it out. The reason for this, they argue, was to provide NATO
with an opportunity not only discredit the Bosnian Serbs,
but to provide the pretext to use heavy air strikes on them
so as to destroy their military potential. The Russian
intelligence service (FSB) were said to had known about the
preparation of the plan since February 1995. Then a detailed
plan, allegedly called Cyclone 2, was related to a secret
memorandum, signed on 10th August 1995 at the Pleso airport
in Zagreb, Croatia. The memorandum was signed for the UN by
the commander of the UNPROFOR forces based Croatia and
Bosnia,General B. Janvier and by Admiral L. Smith for NATO.
This secret memorandum was only passed on, as "secret", on
13th September 1995 to the UN Security Council, when the
main destruction of Serb targets had already taken place.
According to article 7 of the memorandum UNPROFOR agreed to
provide all information necessary for the NATO strikes
against Serb targets to achieve the maximum
success.

According to the FSB, the
mortar was fired from the roof of a building near the market
and they further claimed that the device was not a standard
mortar bomb. Another author, Y. Bodansky, the director of
the Republican parliamentary task force studying terrorism
and unconventional warfare (Target America, Terrorism in
the US Today, S.P.I. Books, Shapolsky Publishers, New
York, 1993), believed that the Bosnian Serb intelligence
service knew that "something was being planned" in Sarajevo.
On 26th August 1995 (two days before the second massacre) he
spoke by telephone to a senior official of the Republika
Srpska in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, who told him
anxiously that once again "something terrible is being
planned against the Serbs" in Sarajevo. How much of this is
true, made up or just a joint FSB-Bosnian Serb
disinformation campaign is hard to assess.

Another report indicating that
the Bosnian Serbs were not responsible for this market place
attacks was published in The Sunday Times on October
1st 1995. It claimed that British ammunition experts serving
with the UN in Sarajevo had "challenged" key evidence of the
attack on the bread market which not only triggered NATO
attacks against the Serbs in Bosnia, but turned the tide of
the war against them. According to the newspaper, the
British experts:

"found no evidence
that the Bosnian Serbs had fired the lethal
round"

Nora Beloff, writing in her
book Yugoslavia: An Avoidable War (New European
Publications, London, England, 1997), also allege that "that
Bosnian government arranged to kill their own people" so as
to get the Bosnian Serbs blamed. She alleges the news
reporter Martin Bell, now an independent MP in Britain, had
known about these allegations through his contacts with
British UN officers but "he ignored what they might have
told him". She repeats claims, as reported in David Owen's
account of the bombings, that western experts had discovered
that it was the Bosnian government forces and not the
Bosnian Serbs who had been behind the attack in February
1994. Allegedly, when UNPROFOR wanted the Bosnian government
to participate in truce negotiations, the British commander,
General Michael Rose:

"Blackmailed the
Bosnian Muslim leaders into submission. He told them that
unless they agreed to cooperate, he would tell the
international press that he had technical expertise
proving that the grenade came from the Muslim, not the
Serb, side" (Beloff, p112/113).

Other attacks supposedly
carried out by the Bosnian government - and blamed on the
Bosnian Serbs - include:

29th June 1992: Rocket
attack on Sarajevo's TV station kills 5 people. Bosnian
government troops implicated in this attack (The
Sunday Times, October 1st 1995).

17th July 1992: A
"choreographed" mortar salvo, 30 seconds after British
Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd entered a building for a
meeting with the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic.
The attack killed or wounded 10 bystanders - but not
Hurd's guard of honor, who had clearly been forewarned
and ducked for cover seconds before the
attack.

4th August 1992: Bomb
attacks which were filmed by the Western film crews at a
funeral of two orphans in a cemetery in Sarajevo. The
attacks were blamed on the Bosnian Serbs.

13th August 1992: After the
Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic arrives in Sarajevo
airport for a meeting with Izetbegovic, a Bosnian
government sniper kills US TV producer David Kaplan. The
attacks disrupts the schedule of Panic, and he only
manages to spend 20 minutes on the phone with
Izetbegovic.

Philip Corwen, a senior member
of the UN in Bosnia has recently written a book about his
experience there (Dubious Mandate: A memoir of the UN in
Bosnia, Summer 1995 [Duke, London, UK,
1999]):

"The French forces
(the main UN armed force in Sarajevo) were continually
harassed, shot at, blocked at, and threatened by Bosnian
government forces . . . it was the French who pointed out
that the Bosnian government was placing weapons systems
next to UN facilities in order to draw fire from Serb
artillery onto civilian and UN targets and thus provoke
international outrage against the Serbs . ..
(p178)

I recommend that readers
interested in the background to the conflict in Bosnia read
Corwen's book: His meticulous account shatters once and for
all the "one victim - one enemy" myth promoted mainly by the
Western media. For the record, l unequivocally condemn the
war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out by the
Bosnian Serb regime against the people of Sarajevo - whom
they relentlessly bombed and shelled. The Bosnian Serb
leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic have been
rightfully indicted by the International war crimes tribunal
in the Netherlands - but why has this tribunal failed to
indict Alija Izectbegovic, the Bosnian President and other
senior officials of his government when there is clearly
enough prima-facie evidence of their complicity in war
crimes carried out by the Bosnian army ? I believe that the
UN probably has ample evidence to show that the Bosnian
government carried out these attacks in Sarajevo, but along
with NATO, decided not to pursue charges against Bosnian
government leaders for political reasons, and decided to
sweep the whole story under the carpet and suppress
it.

"Up to 300 men,
women and children who lived close to the site of the
(NATO) bombings in 1995 have died of cancers and leukemia
over the last five years". Robert Fisk, 2001

Finally the bombings of the
market place unleashed a wave of NATO air-strikes against
Bosnian Serb military targets in and around Sarajevo. In
these attacks, bombs and bullets used by the NATO jets used
Depleted Uranium (DU) that is now estimated to have claimed
the lives of some Serb 300 civilians who lived in the
vicinity of the bases hit by NATO. According to Robert Fisk,
writing in The Independent of Sunday on 14th January
2001, NATO subjected the Serb military bases and surrounding
civilian areas to an intense bombardment between 30th August
to 15th September 1995, using jets and artillery from Mount
Igman just outside Sarajevo. Civilians living in the area
surrounding the bases starting to begin suffering from a
variety of symptoms now linked to the use of DU by NATO in
Bosnia. NATO governments have so far shown little interest
in helping the civilian victims of DU in either Bosnia,
Yugoslavia or during the assault on Iraq in 1990.